Agrippina
ENO, Coliseum, London

Anca Dumitrescu
posted 1 March 2007

A man steps onto the left side of the stage and opens a book. He wears a black suit. A few hours later, all the singers perform the final aria of the opera lying on granite-like tombs aligned in a row in front of our eyes. The black-suited man, the storyteller, reappears to close the book.

The opera, the story of Agrippina, is over. Retrospectively, one understands the significance of the dark and stony setting, the grave-like shapes of tables and chairs. The last moments reminded me of the uncomfortable feeling one experiences when wandering in cathedrals and stepping on graves which are barely visible and yet contain souls that used to live and breathe. Watching Agrippina is like peeping through the keyhole at a private drama. The characters are not merely opera characters, but achieve the substance of real people, who lived and breathed some time ago and were resurrected from their graves by Handel's musical genius. Director David McVicar's Agrippina is a story of the 'splendours and miseries' of the powerful: the Nerones, the Agrippinas of this world. Yet, because the 'powerful' were resurrected from their eternal sleep, Agrippina is more than a simple Roman story; it is life itself; life that occurred some twenty centuries ago; life that will occur again and again.

The story of Agrippina, her insatiable quest for power at a time when the Roman Empire reached its apex, constitutes the core of Handel's opera. Using her immature and debilitated son Nerone as a proxy for her imperial ambitions, Agrippina deploys sexual manoeuvres with Pallante and Narciso (two Roman dignitaries) or emotional artifices with her husband, the emperor Claudio, and Poppea (a Roman lady, and the emperor's mistress) in order to have Nerone on the throne, at the expense of Ottone, Claudio's chosen successor.

In many respects, Handel's Agrippina becomes a woman's opera under McVicar's direction. The plot and its intricacies are driven by Agrippina (Part I) and Poppea (Part II). Power and cruelty, love and lust gravitate around Agrippina and Poppea respectively. Poppea, who is probably the most difficult role in Handel opera, constitutes one of the main characters, yet she is of secondary importance and certainly less colourful than the 'bloody' Agrippina. In a lesser performance, it could have easily turned into a monotonous and passive character manipulated by Agrippina, Claudio, and the rest. Yet, Lucy Crowe's vocal and stage performance as Poppea almost manages to overshadow Agrippina (Sarah Connolly). With Crowe, the most virtuosi and vocally difficult passages surge with a jovial fluidity. Her technical mastership enables her to develop a singing where music becomes akin to sparkling champagne bubbles that truly inebriate the audience. Above all, Crowe puts her own print on the character of Poppea, thus creating a woman full of resources and ready to retaliate to defend her beloved. Similarly, Connolly's art of creating and playing with subtle vocal nuances reaches an emotional climax in the 'Obsession' aria. Christine Rice (Nerone) also deserves praise for the cocaine scene (in fact, all her arias are pure jewels from a vocal point of view) where Nerone unveils his tragic powerlessness, hence expressing the grandeur and decay of life itself. The sheer beauty of Rice's singing colludes with the utter ugliness of drug addiction, in the same way as perfection coexists with imperfection in real life. From a musical perspective, Connolly, Rice and Crowe form an 'infernal trio' giving way to a spectacular singing, hardly matched by their male counterparts.

If Part I exhibits some musical strengths, Part II contains some of the wittiest and most beautiful moments from a musical and theatrical perspective. McVicar's staging is a symbiosis of musical and literary genres. From Molieresque misunderstandings (Poppea hiding behind a pot of flowers in the bar) and tragedy (the 'Obsession' aria by Agrippina), to elegy (Ottone and Poppea's love aria in the boudoir) and pure Musical (the Pulp Fiction-inspired dance scene in the bar), McVicar takes an obvious pleasure in amalgamating these different (some would say inherently opposite) styles. He does not stage an opera, but rather redefines the opera genre itself. While most opera directors would stage operas as they think operas 'should be', McVicar gives scant attention to existing conventions. Take the scene where Poppea is desperately striving to drown her sorrows at a 21st century-like club; a few minutes later, while singing her aria, she frantically turns into a cabaret singer. A couple of drinkers take hold of the dance floor, conveying an incredible sense of energy and sexuality. Yet, the DJ of this surrealist club does not juggle with vinyls but with the notes of a harpsichord, playing a long baroque cadenza to accompany the 21st century Soho sexually-aroused dancers.

This was probably amongst the very few times that I have walked out of the opera with this delightful feeling of entertainment. Despite all the emotional bonds I have with music, going to the opera can sometimes prove - I must admit - exhausting both intellectually and physically. Opera mise-en-scènes are rarely entertaining: most often they tend towards the aesthetical. As opera listeners, instinct tells us that singers' mission is to sing in the first place and then act (whenever possible). Ultimately, we consider them as singers. With Agrippina, I did not see mere singers, but fellows in blood and flesh, tormented or tormenting their beloved in this little Roman teatro del mundo. Upon Sarah Connolly singing the 'Obsession' aria, I could not possibly determine what entangled me to the mezzo soprano's breath, second by second, tone after tone. Was the shivering theme composed by Handel or Connolly's subtle yet full of rancour voice that touched me? Was the sight of Agrippina in a mournful setting reminiscent of her moral void? Certainly all of these; however, it is only retrospectively that I can account for this complexity. While seated there in the shadow, I experienced enjoyment and delight at the sight of an art piece which was life itself.

If operas like Agrippina are sometimes truer than life itself, life is also about opera. Whether we are part of the 'powerful' or not, our lives are knots where beauty and decay, happiness and sorrow, incongruously interrelate. Our names may sound less Latin, but we all are Agrippinas deep inside.

Till 3 March 2007